I think the rapid mental and physical decline in your twilight years dissuades most people from wanting to live much longer than that, not some inane moral compulsion to live within our "rightful" lifespan.
Everyone advocating and working towards increasing lifespan wants to eliminate that mental and physical decline. The goal is to give you more years feeling 30-40, not just more years feeling 90-110.
That decline is what kills you. If you live longer, it is necessary that this decline be inhibited. Saying you don't want to live longer is basically the same as saying you want to be less healthy.
That's too simple. Slowing the decline for people who are in at least moderately good health who can enjoy life is of course a good thing. But in poor health, with no prospects of improvement... well, when's the last time you've visited a nursing home?
The experience of helping taking care someone in hospice care makes it very clear that at some point they can't do much of anything, or enjoy much of anything, and prolonging the suffering is not on the agenda of anyone with a heart.
Ok then. Let's just take this broad conversation about "most people" and distort it with wildly pessimistic and self-contradictory assumptions.
I can only repeat myself here. If you want to live longer, you want better health. If you don't want better health because "there's no prospect for improvement", then I don't know what to tell you. That's a contradiction.
In any case, slowing the decline due to aging doesn't mean you spend more time in a nursing home. I means you delay entering a nursing home in the first place.
I agree that it's very useful to prolong the amount of time spent in earlier, healthier stages of life. The treatments described in the New Yorker article sound quite promising.
However, you aren't taking the elderly seriously. It's not "wildly pessimistic" to spend time thinking about what happens after people get beyond that point. This is something that happens to everyone who doesn't die first. It's a normal part of life.
Look, you're the one saying that elderly people are so miserable that we should not prolong their lives.
>It's not "wildly pessimistic" to spend time thinking about what happens after people get beyond that point.
Your thoughts are pessimistic, not the fact that you are thinking. The main purpose of a nursing home is to extend the length of people's lives. If you think this is inhumane, then perhaps you would prefer a crematorium to a nursing home?
There is nothing about extending the life of people who are in a place specifically to have their lives extended that is 'not taking the elderly seriously.'
You're engaging in one-bit thinking, where things are either one extreme or the other. I didn't say that everyone in a nursing home wants to die! That's something you made up. However, you can find people with very poor health there. Let me quote from the article I linked to:
"In medical jargon, healthy people are “alert and oriented x 3”, which means oriented to person (you know your name), oriented to time (you know what day/month/year it is), and oriented to place (you know you’re in a hospital). My patients who have the sorts of issues I mentioned in the last paragraph are generally alert and oriented x0. They don’t remember their own names, they don’t know where they are or what they’re doing there, and they think it’s the 1930s or the 1950s or don’t even have a concept of years at all. When you’re alert and oriented x0, the world becomes this terrifying place where you are stuck in some kind of bed and can’t move and people are sticking you with very large needles and forcing tubes down your throat and you have no idea why or what’s going on."
It doesn't happen to everyone, but it does happen enough that people who work in health care, or have had to help elderly relatives, or anyone closer to the end of their life needs to think about what to do about it, and set up things like advance directives and medical power of attorney.
There is also the POLST, which is a pink sheet with doctor's orders that terminally ill people put on their refrigerator that tell paramedics not to do CPR (for example). https://polst.org/polst-and-advance-directives/
Although the health care system is usually about extending people's lives, this is not always appropriate. Acknowledging that is just being real about what goes on as people get close to death.
>Slowing the decline for people who are in at least moderately good health who can enjoy life is of course a good thing. But in poor health, with no prospects of improvement
This is a really silly and non-sensical line of reasoning. We're talking here about achieving biological immortality: stopping the aging process. This would necessarily require understanding human biology and cellular processes at an extremely detailed level, in order to modify them artificially to stop aging altogether. (Most likely, this will require periodic treatments, much like we currently go to the dentist every 6 months for a cleaning.) If we have the technology to do this, people aren't going to be in poor health with "no prospects for improvement": the anti-aging technology or treatments are going to change that.
You're engaging in one-bit reasoning where longevity treatments are either a magic fountain of youth, stopping aging and disease completely, or they don't work at all. But how can we know how well they will work?
I think it's more likely that the first ones could add years or decades of life without being nearly that good, and perhaps still having significant side effects or just not affecting some aspects of aging. If so, difficult decisions about what to do when closer to death won't go away.
Those difficult decisions are there right now; life extensions just push them further away. I don't see the problem here. And yes, longevity treatments will necessarily involve reducing disease and aging, or else they won't increase your lifespan. Aging is simply a disease, where much like AIDS causes your immune system to fail which causes other diseases to kill you, with aging some other aging-related disease finally kills you, such as Alzheimer's, cancer, heart disease, etc. Longevity treatments will necessarily result in less disease, even if they can't figure out how to stop all diseases right away. I don't see how they'll result in hordes of centenarians on life support.
I'm not saying there is any new problem, just that the problems of aging may still be rather similar to today, just happening later.
If life doesn't really go on forever and people still eventually die of some disease or other, that's a lot of old people who are on life support at some point in their lives, right? Just like today.
As AstralStorm said, you just made the argument for why it should be pursued. If you look at humans as economic units, we as a society invest an incredible amount of time and resources into every person to make them a productive adult: it takes a bare minimum of 18 years, and generally more like 22-26, with a lot of education and other resources. Then if they're too feeble to be productive by the time they're 70, that's only 40-something years. If you extend the lifespan just so they can be productive until 110, you've now doubled your return on that investment!
On top of that, now with people delaying parenthood so much, or not even having kids, we're facing demographic problems (too many old people being supported by too few young workers). If people have significantly longer adult lives, this could very well make it more feasible and desirable to have kids at older ages, which could stabilize the population problem. (People could have two kids at 40, and two more at 60, and two more at 80, for instance.)
I'm not sure I buy your arguments, though. For people who earn enough to retire and live off investments, this could mean more time in retirement, rather than more time working. (Still good, but not a productivity boost.)
Also, I don't see a reason to assume that an anti-aging treatment would delay the end of fertility in women past 35 or so, or make egg freezing work for longer. Those would be separate medical advances.
>For people who earn enough to retire and live off investments, this could mean more time in retirement, rather than more time working. (Still good, but not a productivity boost.)
Who cares? As long as they're not a drain on the system (compared to today), what's the problem? That sounds like a big plus actually: people getting to enjoy more time in their lives. Why would anyone not want that, unless they're some kind of religious nut who thinks this isn't "god's will" or something?
>Also, I don't see a reason to assume that an anti-aging treatment would delay the end of fertility in women past 35 or so, or make egg freezing work for longer. Those would be separate medical advances.
I don't think they'd be entirely separate. We can already freeze eggs, and women are able to carry children at older ages (sometimes not even their own children) thanks to IVF now. Anti-aging treatments should make this even better; women may routinely get their eggs frozen at 25, and then use them to make children at 75.
